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In a single week, Google has acquired Nest, news have leaked saying it’s working on smart lenses and Dropbox has announced another $250M round, with a valuation at $10B. While we sit and try to look at the market, entrepreneurs keep moving. The most remarkable news for this week is the acquisition of Nest. A couple of years back Google showed us a project it was working on, called Android@Home. After that introduction at I/O, the leading conference for the tech giant, nothing has been said.
For months, we have kept wondering if that project was still alive or not. Apparently Google is making an effort to keep working on what it showed us more than two years ago. With a $3.2B acquisition in cash, which was just the result of previous investments from Google Ventures, the most famous search engine, that doesn’t want to be evil, has got another asset. The company has firstly affirmed, in a press release, that Nest will operate independently, however there might be a chance that we’ll see Android@Home again.
The Nest’s portfolio includes a thermostat and a smoke sensor, called Nest Protect. Both devices belong to the smart generation, the one where the device tells you what it is going on around you. In the past years, the company has been able to raise more than $80M in funding, which have consequentially led to the 3B overall valuation. The aim of Nest Labs is to build devices that learn things and understand how you behave. That’s why the company raised growing interest in tech giants and in those who believe we need a more technological and advanced world.
What Nest brings to Mountain View is a team of 200 people who know how to make simple devices smart. Nest Labs was founded in 2013 by two former Apple engineers and one year later, in 2011, introduced its first product the Nest Thermostat. Android@Home vision was to connect everything in your home to your smartphone and be able to handle everything from a single universal device, your phone. After the failure of the Nexus Q, which was never delivered on the market, it seemed Google didn’t care about Home anymore.
However, a new scenario has opened for the company. Now, with already two successful smart home devices, Google’s portfolio is ready to take off and increase on the value that these people have brought to the company. In the Google’s web there is already the Google Tv that has been pushing the market in the last months. Further with the knowledge that Google is gaining through service such as Google Now, everything can be built.
The next frontier is to make your fridge smart and your oven even more. Think about a world where you are coming back from your daily job and you find your oven already warm, because the device knew you wanted to use it in that day and you were coming back. In the same way, your lights can be set or maybe even your windows. The way the technology is going to integrate with our home devices is going to be revolutionary and a company that is developing a self driving car, smart lenses and smart glasses must be part of this new market.
In the same picture, Google has also recently bought Boston Dynamics, which is a company that develops and builds robots. Goolge is looking at the future, a world where Robots can work for the human being, devices can understand the world that surrounds us and tell us what to do next. In the next years, there will be a tech rush for smart devices such as walls, tables and even chairs; but with the Nest acquisition, Google has already secured a place.
